Electronic books have been available in some form for a couple of decades, but the 7-month-old Amazon Kindle is flashing the publishing industry its clearest peek at the future of reading - even if analysts say the much-hyped e-reading device won't immediately upend the text business as the iPod has recently transformed the music world.

The 10-ounce Kindle, which holds 200 e-books and can also tirelessly download daily editions of 19 newspapers and 346 blogs, is fielding pretty heady praise for a device few have seen. Amazon hasn't released sales figures, which makes skeptics wonder about its market penetration. New York tech blog Silicon Alley Insider recently posted a photo of a subway rider holding a Kindle under the headline: "Found! A Real Amazon Kindle User."

"We were talking about (the Kindle's low public visibility) at the office the other day. Who's really seen one out there?" said Steve Weinstein, an analyst who tracks Amazon and other Internet commerce sites for Portland's Pacific Crest.

Nevertheless, Weinstein predicted that Amazon's global e-book sales could hit $2.5 billion by 2012. He estimates that the company sold 40,000 units a month this year at its original price of $399 (the price was recently reduced to $359, including wireless charges) and could sell between 700,000 and 800,000 by the end of 2008.

"I don't expect it to have the same impact on the industry as the iPod had on the music industry," Weinstein said.

Greener, easy to use

While the Kindle might not be at the center of a culturally transforming technology moment like the iPod, Weinstein said, "It could be at the very beginning of one."

So if the Kindle is not the publishing world's version of the internal combustion engine, perhaps it is more like its Prius: a greener, easy-to-use device that heralds the industry's future.

But the paperback-book-size gadget, which comes in a black leather carrying case, is still too expensive for the mainstream market, analysts say.

"It's an important step," said Roger Fidler, who directs a digital publishing program at the University of Missouri and has studied digital publishing for two decades. He is finishing a report on three of the latest e-reading devices for the newspaper publishing industry. "The Kindle has opened the door to e-reading for people. It's the equivalent to what the early notebook computers were in the 1990s."

Strong buzz for Kindle

Buzz about the Kindle has remained strong since a Newsweek cover in November marked its premiere. A quick sellout of the product's initial small inventory followed, according to Amazon. Chatter about the Kindle spiked again several weeks ago at BookExpo America in Los Angeles, when an appearance by Amazon chief executive officer Jeff Bezos put the wireless reader on everyone's lips.

Amazon released some promising but vague statistics at the May publishing conference: Among the 125,000 (now 130,000) titles the company sells in both physical and electronic versions, the e-versions account for 6 percent of unit book sales. How much is that? Amazon won't be specific. "We're extremely pleased so far," said Jay Marine, director of product management for the Kindle.

Regardless, the Kindle's influence is starting to reverberate across the publishing industry. Shortly after Bezos spoke in Los Angeles, the publishing house Simon & Schuster Inc. announced it will digitize 5,000 more titles by the end of the year - more than it did during the previous decade. Earlier this year, Penguin Group announced plans to digitize its back catalog of 16,000 titles within two years. When the Kindle launched in November, it could offer readers only 1,000 digitized titles.

Sony in holding pattern

The nearly 2-year-old Sony Reader was the highest profile pre-Kindle electronic reading device, but publishers and analysts said it hasn't attracted more than the early-adopter crowd. The biggest drawback of the Sony Reader: Users must plug the device into a computer to download books. Shortly after the Kindle premiere, Penguin noticed a sales spike of e-titles, said Tim McCall, vice president of online sales at Penguin Group USA.

"We see (the Kindle) as an incremental change - it's certainly a device that has energized the digitization of books," McCall said. "When it came out, it was the first time we had really started selling any e-titles. All publishers have known that they have to do this (digitize their backlists of titles), but nobody was in a hurry to do so because there wasn't something out there that people were using. Now there is.

"But we're still making decisions based on only about six months worth of information," McCall said. "We don't know what's going to happen next."

The e-reading world still is a microscopic portion of the $37 billion U.S. book publishing industry. And some wonder whether any gadget - no matter how cool - will encourage the text-messaging generation to pick up a digitized book. A Random House/Zogby poll released in May found that 82 percent of the respondents preferred to read a printed book over some other format. And a Piper Jaffray and Co. online survey of 344 people in June found that 71 percent of the respondents wouldn't buy an e-reading device even if price wasn't a factor.

Authors and booksellers - particularly independent bookstores- are seeing an uncertain future with the Kindle. Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, said "our fear is the long-term effect on royalties and revenues" for the 8,000-member trade organization for published authors.

With Amazon selling e-books for $9.99, less than half the price of most hardcover books, the entire industry's business model could be upended. While e-books don't have the production and distribution costs that their hardcover ancestors do, publishers, agents and authors are scrambling to figure out what changes this new economic order will bring.

Aiken is a bit fearful of Amazon controlling not only the dominant device on the market but also a large and popular inventory of titles, because "then you can control the lion's share of the profits," he said.

(Representatives of several publishing houses declined to speak on the record about the Kindle's effect for fear of alienating Amazon.)

What effect on authors?

While megaselling authors such as Michael Crichton and Stephen King probably won't have to worry about a new economic playing field, Aiken wonders what it might mean to midlist authors who don't get big advances. "Will they decide that it just isn't worthwhile for them to write?"

Amazon's Marine says she thinks the device will encourage more people to read and buy more books. Already, Amazon said that its Kindle customers are buying 2 1/2 times as many books as their dead-tree-buying book customers.

Independent booksellers are concerned, as the past few years haven't been kind, largely because of the growing strength of online retailers such as Amazon. Berkeley's popular Cody's Books closed last month, a victim to the changing bookselling scene.

Certain types of books don't lend themselves to being read on a tiny, black-and-gray screen, which doesn't reproduce photos well. So don't look for art books on e-readers anytime soon - or other coffee-table tomes. "Or a cookbook. Are you going to want to put your greasy hands on a handheld device when you're reading a recipe?" said Pete Mulvihill, co-owner of Green Apple Books, a store in San Francisco. But he could see people who wanted to pluck "a few pages out of a travel book" buying an e-reader.

"But I'm a sucker for the printed page. And there's not very many technologies that have lasted 500 years without changing much," Mulvihill said. "That said, the Kindle is pretty cool."